Jade turned slowly, trying to recall where to go next, and then pointed once more into the tangle of foliage. Ten minutes of slow bushwhacking brought them to a tall evergreen tree that did not look much different than the hundreds like it they had already passed.
“This is the one,” Jade announced.
Professor looked around at the other trees. “The one what?”
She shrugged out of her backpack and dropped it on the ground. “This is where we need to dig.”
The waterlogged tropical soil was no match for the collapsible entrenching tools they had picked up in San Jose. Jade felt a little professional shame at the amateurish exploration — this kind of treasure hunting was more Maddock’s style — but circumstances had given her little choice. She consoled herself with the knowledge that she wasn’t just digging random holes like a relic hunter; she knew precisely where to look, even if she didn’t know precisely what she was going to find.
There was a scratching noise as the tip of her digging tool scraped against something hard, not one of the tree’s sturdy roots, but something made of stone. With even more eagerness, she began scooping dirt away from the spot and soon revealed a large stone surface, curving gently away in every direction.
“Another sphere,” Professor observed, not without a trace of admiration. “A big one by the look of it. At least four feet in diameter.”
“It must have been buried centuries ago. The tree grew right on top of it. No one was ever going to find this one.”
Professor put his hand over his mouth and coughed, though Jade distinctly heard the word: “Bootstrap.”
I can’t disagree. Without the premonition, there’s no way we would have ever known where to look.
In any case, this was exactly the way she remembered it.
She kept shoveling, exposing more of the sphere. Unlike any of the others they had encountered since arriving in Costa Rica, this one was in pristine condition. It was astonishingly smooth and when she brushed away the dirt with her gloved hands, it shone like a piece of polished granite.
She glanced up at the others and then took off her gloves. “Ok, I’m going to try touching it. I have no idea what’s going to happen.”
She reached out, laying a fingertip on the dark stone surface. It was warm, much warmer than she expected, though she couldn’t tell if it was a real effect, or just her nerves reacting with her imagination. She placed both palms against the sphere.
“I’m definitely feeling something,” she said. “Heat, and a tingling, like static electricity.”
“There have been similar reports about the spheres on the mainland,” Professor said. “They retain heat and may even have their own magnetic field. That might account for what you’re feeling.”
“But no visions?” asked Dorion, sounding almost disappointed.
She shook her head.
“What’s that?” Professor pointed to the still covered top of the sphere. Jade cleared away more of the dirt to reveal something carved in the surface.
“It’s a petroglyph.” They had seen carvings on the spheres at the museum and at Finca 6, mostly spirals and other curving lines that looked like they might have been constellation maps, all of them badly weathered, so as to make interpretation a guessing game. This one was in much better shape. “It looks like a fish,” Jade said.
“Or a dolphin,” Professor said. “In fact, it looks a lot like the dolphin petroglyphs at Easter Island. What’s that on the right side? Waves?”
Jade brushed away more dirt to reveal a zigzag line that looked like a W but in the process, uncovered more lines carved in the sphere. Soon, she had uncovered a row of symbols that curled around the top of the sphere:
Jade felt her earlier excitement vanish like a candle flame in a stiff breeze. “W C O M? ‘Welcome’? Is this some kind of joke?”
Professor stared at the letters without even a trace of amusement. “Jade, that’s Phoenician writing.”
She looked at the carving again in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Why is that important?” asked Dorion.
“A lot of people believe that the Phoenicians discovered the Americas two thousand years before Columbus,” Jade explained. “There’s never been anything approaching definitive proof though.” She turned back to Professor. “What’s it say?”
“Jade, I know a few things, but I’m not Wikipedia.” He nevertheless screwed his face up in concentration. “The Phoenician alphabet — technically it was called Proto-Canaanite — was a precursor to the Greek, so there are a lot of similarities. That last letter for example is exactly what it looks like, an ‘M.’ Mu in Greek.”
He studied it a moment longer. “Sigma… That hook shape might be lambda. Phi? Or maybe something else. The Greeks added some sounds and tossed out others. Could be a ‘Q;’ the Greeks didn’t have one of those. And of course, mu. I think ‘slphm’ or maybe ‘slqm’ is probably closer to the mark. The problem is that Semitic languages were written without the vowels, so it’s like an abbreviation, the way we might write ‘bldg’ for ‘building.’ Oh, wait. Semitic languages were also written right to left, so we have to reverse it. ‘Mqls’ or ‘mphls.’ Hard to say what the vowel sounds were supposed to be. If we had a computer, we’d crack this in about two seconds.”
“M-ph-l-s,” Jade enunciated each letter as a separate syllable, and then it hit her. Professor’s eyes went wide as well; he had heard it too.
“What?” Dorion’s gaze flitted between them. “What does it say?”
“Omphalos,” Professor said, almost reverently. “It’s the Greek word for ‘navel.’”
“And Gil Perez wrote about the ‘navel of the moon.’ This can’t be a coincidence.”
“Wait,” Dorion said. “I know this word, ‘omphalos.’ There is a stone artifact at Delphi called ‘Omphalos.’ I visited there when I began my search. It isn’t a sphere, though.”
“The Greeks believed the Omphalos — the navel of the world — was at Delphi,” Professor explained. “What you saw was their representation of it. It’s supposed to resemble an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes. Rhea, the mother of Zeus, made it to fool her husband Cronus, who wanted to devour his own children. There are several more like it all over the region. No telling which, if any, is the original.”
“Could there have been a dark matter field there at Delphi?” asked Jade. “Maybe that was the true source of the Oracle’s visions?”
Dorion shook his head. “I was there. I felt nothing.”
“Or maybe it was once there and somebody took it,” Jade suggested.
Professor pointed at the sphere. “You think that’s the original Omphalos?”
“Or another representation of it. Think about it. The Phoenicians were sailing the eastern seas at least a millennium before the time of Christ. The Bible talks about the Phoenician King Hiram sending a fleet out from the Red Sea on a two year long voyage to the land of Ophir to bring back gold for Solomon’s temple. No one has ever been able to figure out where Ophir is, but it was located somewhere to the southeast off the Red Sea. What if Ophir was in the Americas? The Phoenicians could have sailed that far.”
“So this sphere, and all the others, were supposed to be copies of the original?”
“They may have been more than that,” suggested Dorion. “The spheres might have acted as dark matter collectors, especially if they were in close proximity to an existing field. The original Omphalos, if that’s what it was, may have seeded additional spheres with enough dark matter to begin accumulating additional particles on their own.”